I am just astounded at how many of the local spiders are guarding egg sacs right now. It’s as if they know the typical first frost is at the end of September, and then it won’t thaw until maybe May, so they’d better make babies before the killing freeze descends.
Look, spiders, you should know better than to scurry across the floor of someone who has a bag of petri dishes and brushes and vials and who is currently known to scrutinize every corner and surface for spiders. It’s like you’re just asking to be captured.
Fortunately for her, I only hunt with a camera and she is about to be released into my garage.
I saw Yesterday yesterday. You will be shocked to learn that I really liked it.
I have some nitpicks. Lily James is lovely and charming, but she’s playing the same sweet innocent she was in Baby Driver. I hope she gets a chance to extend her range a bit. The premise of the movie is that everyone in the world except for a scattered few completely forget the existence of the Beatles — those few have basically found themselves in a timeline where the band The Beatles never existed. The protagonist, Jack Malik, is a musician who becomes famous for simply recalling and replaying Beatles songs as if he were creating them fresh. This had me wondering…would Beatles songs be as popular and appreciated if they were removed from their social and historical context? Could just any old random person have achieved the heights of fame if they’d composed “Hey, Jude” out of thin air, with no foundation or build-up to the populace?
OK, a more pressing concern: is Ed Sheeran really that popular a starmaker? He’s played up as a fabulous rock star in the movie, and I can’t think of a single song he’s done.
Kate McKinnon was a cartoonish, over-the-top villain, and I cringed every time she was in a scene. She may be a good comedian, but she’s an awful actor, and it didn’t help that she was given a role that demanded she practically twirl an imaginary mustache and cackle.
Those are minor nits. What appealed to me most is that this is an original movie that doesn’t depend on anyone putting on Spandex and punching bad guys — nothing is resolved with violence. It was so refreshing. There was a constant build-up of tension, and how could there not be? It’s about an artist who is aware that he’s using other people’s creativity (even if those other people don’t exist in this timeline), and he’s wracked with doubts. He discovers there are others like him who remember the Beatles, and there is a confrontation…and it doesn’t turn out like I expected at all. All of these situations are dealt with in a very human way.
Also, slight spoiler ahead…
Gosh. Marianne Williamson replied to me and Orac on Twitter, to chide us for not reading her books.
Have you actually read any of my books, Sir? Or are you – contrary to what I assume is your firmly belief in your own intellectual perspicacity – simply presuming you know what they say?
— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) July 23, 2019
It’s true. I haven’t read a whole book by Williamson, only excerpts, and they were enough to convince me she’s not a good candidate, despite her earnest, emotional appeal. Here, for example, is a Twitter thread full of specific examples from her books. They’re appalling.
Sickness is not a sign of God’s judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. If we were to think God created our sickness, how could we turn to Him for healing?
That kind of baseless drivel is not worth reading in greater detail.
Or you could read Lindsay Beyerstein, who did that old-fashioned thing journalists used to do of deeply researching the history and philosophy of Williamson’s beliefs. It’s all very Christian Sciencey, and its roots can be traced back to Christian Science BS.
According to Williamson, not only is the real world an illusion, everything is an illusion, except love. God is love. We only think that we are separate from each other and separate from God – in reality, we are all one. All of our problems, including sickness, are illusory. If we could just get beyond the illusion of sickness, we wouldn’t be sick.
If sickness is all in our mind and our minds can be changed by miracles, you might assume that miracles can cure disease. “Sometimes a miracle is a change in material conditions, such as physical healing,” Williamson writes in “A Return to Love.” “At other times, it is a psychological or emotional change.” This is the bait-and-switch at the heart of Williamson’s teachings. Maybe you’ll get well, or maybe you’ll feel better about being sick, but either way, she’ll get your money.
It’s all your fault, you know. Everything. If only you’d love God, you’d be better.
At times, Williamson sounds very victim-blamey. She claims that over-identification with the physical body at the expense of the spirit places a “stress on the body that the body was not meant to carry – and that’s where sickness comes from.”
When asked whether people get cancer because of bad thoughts, Williamson is quick to say that it’s not necessarily because of their own bad thoughts. Maybe a child got cancer because of someone else’s bad thoughts, she suggests, in “A Return to Love,” arguing that perhaps some evil chemical company executive’s bad thoughts led him to poison the water supply. But that argument conflicts with her theology’s core contention: If the child’s cancer is real (and not just an illusion) and the poisoned water is the real cause, then her claim that only love is real can’t be true. Never mind that it was the chemical executive’s actions that caused the pollution, not his thoughts. Williamson claims that “disease is loveless thinking materialized,” noting that lovelessness can be collective, like racism, which does indeed harm people’s health and shorten their lives. But this doesn’t explain how children are born with diseases that have no environmental or social cause, such as cystic fibrosis.
She has a lot of excuses and is quick with denial, but she can only do that because her beliefs are so nebulous and flexible…but ultimately, they rely on the Christian notion that you are a sinner and you deserve every affliction you get.
Nope, not voting for her ever.
The governor has decreed a 40% cut in their budget, a devastating goal in itself. The university is trying to cope with this disaster by consolidating campuses and firing lots and lots of people. That isn’t going to save them. Look at what’s happening right now.
“It’s awful,” says Milligan-Myhre. “I had to turn away a student planning on starting in the fall because I just don’t know what the department or his degree would look like in a year or two.” She’s also encouraging her current students to graduate as soon as possible.
Imagine that you’re an Alaskan parent, planning to send a child off to college. Would you suggest the University of Alaska? No way. You’d have them send applications off to universities that are more likely to exist in four years, when they’d hope to graduate.
Imagine you’re a current student. You’d be planning to graduate as soon as possible, or to transfer elsewhere. Get out while you can, because the uncertainty is intolerable.
Enrollments are about to plummet, which is going to increase the financial hardship. 40% cuts is a torpedo below the waterline.
It’s not just teaching that is harmed, it’s the research side as well.
The budget cuts have already altered some researchers’ plans. Milligan-Myhre, who studies a native Alaskan fish called the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), has dropped out of a “once in a lifetime” ecological experiment. Dozens of researchers from across the globe plan to combine various stickleback populations in ten lakes that have previously been treated to kill all invasive fish. The idea is to track how differences in the lakes’ ecosystems influence a host of traits in the fish — from the composition of their gut microbiomes to characteristics of their brain tissue — over decades, revealing evolution in action.
Milligan-Myhre is using the time she would have spent on the experiment to hunt for work. “I just don’t have time to devote to this project because I’ve got to be writing my butt off the next few months,” she says. “I need to get as many papers out as I can to prep my CV for job applications, because I have no job security. [The university] can fire me with 60 days’ notice.”
That’s tough to explain to constituents because they’re just seeing an obscure little fish — it doesn’t even have commercial value — but sticklebacks are an important model system for studying evolution and development, because they are so common and diverse. Alaska is killing basic research for an undefined and self-destructive end.
The only solution is to recall the governor and about half the legislature. That’s almost impossible. The governor is making these cuts while promising to mail out large dividend checks to the general Alaskan population, so he’s basically buying support for the evisceration of Alaskan education and Alaskan health and human services.
Once again, Republicans are accusing Democrats of what they routinely do, draining the treasury to buy votes.
I surprised myself with how much I had written about Sergio Canavero, the quack who wants to do a human head transplant. His technique is to chop the head off one body, and the body off one head, and fuse them together by slathering the stumps with ethylene glycol, a substance that dissolves cell membranes and encourages fusion. It won’t work. It can’t work. He’s been working with rats, getting improbable results that he spins into great triumphs, but no one believes him. The whole experiment is dangerous and unethical, and at best what he was going to end up with is a severed head perfused with blood from a disconnected heart. It was going to be a nightmare scenario for his patient/victim.
But he had a volunteer. A young man, Valery Spiridonov, with a serious genetic degenerative disorder that was going to gradually shut down his entire muscular system was willing to take a desperate gamble and undergo Canavero’s horrible procedure. It wasn’t going to help, only make his condition abruptly worse, but hey, he was going to take a risk for a miracle. But now something has changed, and he has withdrawn from the experiment. No, his disease wasn’t cured, and there’s still no hope for him.
Instead, Spiridonov found love.
In late 2017, Spiridonov married computer expert Anastasia Panfilova, and the couple now shares a 5-month-old son who doesn’t appear to have inherited the disease, he explained to Good Morning Britain.
“I cannot leave them without my attention, even for a few months,” he said of the time he would be away from his family if he were to go through with the operation.
Yes! Canavero was actively neglecting the human side of the equation, but Spiridonov went on living his life, despite a seriously disabling condition, and found someone he cared about and a new reason to persevere. He might be doomed, but in the face of inevitable decline he found something else to hope for.
That’s beautiful.
Now Canavero is going to have to find a new guinea pig. I hope he doesn’t.
